Dr. Carlos Ponce

Biography

Carlos Ponce is an Assistant Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. His main research goal is to understand how the visual brain works in the natural world, especially when presented with rich and complex scenes encountered in daily life. His focus is on the brain of the rhesus macaque, employing electrophysiological techniques to record neuronal activity across the visual cortex hierarchy, including areas V1, V2, V4, inferring temporal cortex, and prefrontal cortex. Ponce uses leading-edge neural networks and tools for generating stimuli, such as generative adversarial networks, to model the visual system, including convolutional neural networks and vision transformers. His work enables manipulation of images in complex ways to identify the types of visual information encoded by cortical neurons. He also compares this information across neural network architectures, leveraging monkey behavior to gain insights into the origins and evolution of visual representations. Behavioral tasks play a critical role in his research, necessitating continual refinement of animal training techniques through computer-based automation and tablet-based training in animals' home cages. His methodologies are grounded in ethological and ethical principles, allowing for adjustments in task complexity according to the animals' natural capabilities. Through bridging visual neuroscience with machine learning, he hopes to advance automated visual recognition technologies in areas like medical imaging, security, and autonomous driving, shedding light on the subjective experience of vision.

Research Interests